The present disclosure relates generally to multicomputer data transfer and more particularly to information exchange, application porting, and system migration in heterogeneous platform environments.
A code set or coded character set, such as UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1, is a set of rules that defines a human language character set and a one-to-one relationship between each character in the language, for example, alphanumeric characters, and its computer operating system recognized bit pattern. Different operating system platforms, such as Linux®, AIX®, Solaris®, Hewlett-Packard®, and Windows®, may each utilize a different set of standards, versions, and rules (e.g. customization rules) to encode the same human language characters.
Encoded characters may be converted from one encoding to another with code set converters. Code set converters, use first-code-set-to-second-code-set mappings, or code set mappings, that define the relationship between two code sets to map characters encoded in a first code set to the encoding of a second code set. A plurality of code set converters exist to support the multitude of different languages and code set standards worldwide. Code set conversion is an important feature in a multi-national server operating system, especially in an information exchange network in which information crosses geographic locations and operating system platforms.